Temporal, an open-source microservices orchestration platform used by companies including Netflix, Snap and Comcast, has raised $75 million from high-profile investors including Sequoia Capital and GreenOx.
In contrast, a few months ago, some reports suggested that the valuation had dropped below $900 million, but the startup maintained its unicorn status, seeking a valuation of more than $1.5 billion.
In the year Founded in 2019, Temporal’s microservices-based software architecture simplifies the development of distributed systems. Such distributed systems depend on “queues” – a type of asynchronous service node – and databases to synchronize data on board, which is not always reliable and difficult to manage at scale.
Persistent
Temporal, which calls itself a “durable execution system,” allows companies to manage application state and monitor logical execution, all while pushing software updates without disruption. At the end of the day, it’s all about helping developers and engineers spend time building different products instead of creating reliable code to keep their microservices from breaking.
The Seattle-based startup is the handiwork of Maxim Fateev and Samar Abbas, who while working at Uber developed an open-source orchestration engine called Cadence, which can relay requests and mediate interactions between different microservices to ensure they work in harmony.
The duo left Uber four years ago to start Temporal, an open source project based on a fork of Cadence.
“It simplifies the development process by moving complex, error-checking code, retry processes, and state management to a central platform, so developers don’t have to manage these complex things,” interim CEO Maxim Fateev said in a statement. “My co-founder Samar and I have been building a sustainable execution framework for 15 years, and most of the work is on an ad hoc basis.”
Like other similar open source projects, Temporal is building a hosted cloud implementation for enterprise customers complete with service level agreements (SLAs). Most of its original open source users, including Netflix, Comcast, Snap, Box, Qualtrics, and Postman, have moved to paying cloud customers, though other high-profile users such as Datadog, Instacart, and Coinbase have moved on.
Temporal raised about $129 million last year, including a $103 million Series B round that valued the company at $1.5 billion. In the months that followed, the economic climate drove down the valuations of some of the world’s largest public and private companies, and reports late last year suggested Temporal had suffered a similar fate – valuation tracking service Prime Unicorn Index posted a December Temporal 2016 loss. Between a valuation or raising around $880 million in fresh cash. However, Temporal says the valuation is more or less the same as it was a year ago – so while this round isn’t down, it’s not exactly up either.
The interim latest cash injection includes recurring investments from Series A and Series B backers including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Amplify Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Addition Ventures, along with new investor GreenOx.
